Meet the Tribune editorial board

December 30, 2001

My parents never went to college. They wanted me to be a "professional," like a doctor, so I wouldn't have to work the night shift. After graduating from Ohio University in 1969, I became a professional reporter at the Tribune, which assigned me to the overnight police beat. It's called paying your dues, I was told.

I spent two years in the Army, 11 years on various Tribune beats here and overseas (including participation in a Pulitzer Prize-winning vote fraud investigation in 1972) and four years in television at WBBM-TV. I returned to the Tribune as a columnist and editorial writer in 1984. Five years later I received a Pulitzer for commentary.

In 1991, I moved with my wife, Lisa, and son, Grady, to Washington, where I work out of the Tribune's bureau. Grady, now 12, recently wrote a 700-word column for his school newspaper. He called it, "Page's Page."

That's my boy.

Excuse me. I'm getting all choked up.

Storer H. Rowley

Editorial writer

When we lived in the Middle East, my family grew anxiously familiar with coping during terrorist suicide-bomb attacks in Israel and tourist shootings by Islamic extremists in Egypt. But I never imagined we would live the same nightmare in the U.S.

Israeli-style terrorist alerts, the National Guard at U.S. airports, anthrax in the mail, innocent workers slaughtered in great buildings blasted to rubble. These were scenes from the hatreds and violence of the Mideast. It boggles the mind to see them at home.

After serving for 16 years as a Tribune foreign and national correspondent, covering stories in more than 50 countries and a dozen wars, I returned to my native Chicago in 1998 to write editorials on foreign affairs and defense issues. Turns out the Middle East followed me home.

My pet peeve was that Americans in the 1990s, with the Cold War over, were paying less attention to events abroad, or to the importance of the U.S. role in the world. That has changed. Now people seek books for a crash course on the Mideast, or on how to cope with threats of terrorism.

What you learn from living there is how to try to restore a measure of control to your life. In Israel, I used to brake when driving behind buses to put some distance in between--in case the bus exploded. We stayed away from crowded malls in Jerusalem during heightened terror alerts.

There were calculations of risk. During one alert for a chemical weapons attack from Iraq on Israel, my wife, Carolyn, and I debated whether to buy gas masks for the family, but decided against it. There was a shortage of children's masks. None was available for our two young daughters, Mary and Elizabeth. It would have been outrageous to get them only for ourselves. We plotted a backup escape plan and went on with our lives. No attack came.

Now such calculations are the stuff of daily life in America. So is patriotism. It's good to be home.

Patricia Widder

Editorial writer

When I describe to people the writing part of what I do, I often liken it to writing haiku. That doesn't mean I write poetry--oh, sure, I hope there's a poetic turn of phrase every now and then. But I describe it that way because each word must count and only so many will fit.

Haiku, the Japanese form of poetry, allows for just 17 syllables. There are other restrictions, of course, that make it far more rigid. Haiku is unrhymed, contains three lines of five, seven and five syllables respectively and usually deals in some way with the seasons of the year.

But I look at editorials that way because the canvas of this page is so spare. It is finite. My piece of the canvas is blank and I must fill it. Gulp.

Most newspaper writers love words. Over the course of careers, we get used to writing long, sometimes very long stories. We love to write long stories. That way we can impress you with everything we know.

Editorial writing forces us to prune away excess verbiage and then to prune again, to get at the essence of what we are trying to say. There is no jump space for editorials.

It's a challenge because the pieces my colleagues and I write are often about complex topics that require context. This is important. Here's why. Here's the background. This is what must change. Nuances must be explored, or at least acknowledged. But ultimately our message must be clear and unambiguous.

I write often about the economy, business, trade, financial markets, taxes and budgets. Though they are vitally important to everyone, topics like these can be dry and, well, let's be honest, boring. I try to keep them lively and write in readable language, stripping out jargon wherever I can. Looking for the perfect word and pruning, always pruning. What remains, I hope, is clear.